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Theater Talkback: Better Off Buried

Orlando Iriarte in the revival of "Moose Murders" at the Connelly Theater.Credit Ruby Washington/The New York Times

It’s news to nobody that the contemporary theater thrives on nostalgia. Scan the offerings of any Broadway season of the past decade or so and you’ll probably find more revivals than new shows. This season alone we’ve seen spectacularly unnecessary celebrity-fueled productions of “Glengarry Glen Ross,”“The Heiress” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Money-minting duds, all three of ’em.

But in the last couple of seasons the New York theater has taken its love affair with its own past to perverse new extremes. We’re not just recycling the hits anymore, but trying to capture the mad magic of the legendary bombs.

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Molly Ranson in the 2012 revival of "Carrie."Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Last year MCC Theater exhumed the flop musical “Carrie” from her fiery grave, in the hopes that a more serious-minded, scaled-down production would prove the musical to be not merely a camp footnote in Broadway history but a respectable show. I’m afraid it didn’t quite work. While the score had its moments of beauty and passion, and the singing, by Marin Mazzie in particular, was often galvanizingly good, this watered-down, message-stuffed “Carrie” simply didn’t give us what we really wanted to see: the flashy, high-concept extravaganza that went down in flames so sensationally the first time around.

This season a small Off Broadway company called the Beautiful Soup Theater Collective took an even more dubious stab, as it were, at turning a fabled disaster into a night of bad old-fashioned fun: “Moose Murders” made its first return to a major (sorta) New York stage, at the Connelly Theater in the East Village. The resulting show ranks high among the most insufferable nights I’ve spent at the theater – and I was there for “Prymate,” folks! Remember that one? Andre De Shields as a chimpanzee – or was it an ape? – in a self-serious drama about something to do with simians, and science, and James Naughton looking miserable.

It’s not a coincidence, I think, that both “Carrie” and “Moose Murders” date from the 1980s. Once upon a yesteryear, several big duds studded every Broadway season. During the Golden Age, as the decades between 1930 and 1970 have come to be called, the number of productions on the Great White Way was much higher than in subsequent years. With 50 or 100 shows opening a season, a belly flop made a much smaller splash. The annals of bad musicals throughout these years have been richly documented in Ken Mandelbaum’s indispensable book “Not Since Carrie,” a compendium of misfired shows (capped by “Carrie” itself) that makes for howlingly good reading.

But by 1980, when Frank Rich became the chief theater critic of The New York Times, Broadway production had dwindled significantly as costs skyrocketed, so that a turkey like “Moose Murders” or “Carrie” arrived with a much bigger squawk. (It also helped, I’m sure, that Mr. Rich wrote so deliciously of tasteless theater.) These two shows, bad though they presumably were, earned outsized reputations for folly that left behind them a haze of yearning: Having seen either or both became a badge of honor of sorts. Small wonder theater companies couldn’t resist attempting to trade on their notoriety to fill their seats with those seeking to quench at last their curiosity about just how dire these two infamous shows were.

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Phyllis Frelich and Andre De Shields in the play "Prymate," which opened on Broadway in 2004.Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

We have our answers now, and maybe it’s time to kiss goodbye any lingering longing to revisit the best of Broadway’s worst. I, for one, can honestly say that finally seeing “Carrie” and “Moose Murders” did not enrich my theatergoing life by one iota. And I sincerely hope that no enterprising producer out there is trying to drum up funds for a revival of the Peter Allen vehicle “Legs Diamond,” another famously terrible musical from the 1980s. With or without Hugh Jackman channeling the song-and-dance-man, I have zero interest. And while it is practically the only show bearing Stephen Sondheim’s name that has not been revived – and revived, and revived – in recent years, I don’t particularly pine to see “Getting Away With Murder,” the (presumably moose-free) mystery thriller he penned with George Furth, a quick Broadway flop in 1996.

But perhaps there are those among you who harbor a secret (or open) desire to give reputed dogs another day. Are there Broadway shows you’ve either seen or read about that you believe should be given a second chance to prove the naysayers wrong? Anyone for a revival of “Grind?”